June 24, 2026 — An environmental nonprofit sued the National Marine Fisheries Service on Monday in a bid to push the federal agency to issue protection guidelines for the sunflower sea star, one of the largest sea star species in the world.
The Center for Biological Diversity filed a complaint in the Northern District of California, where the coastal regions around the San Francisco Bay are a historic spot for the multi-armed predator.
The nonprofit says the National Marine Fisheries Service needs to issue a final rule protecting the sea star as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, as its numbers have rapidly declined in the last 13 years.
“Nearly 6 billion sunflower sea stars have died along the West Coast of the United States since 2013,” the center says. “These mass mortalities are due to a wasting disease that starts with gruesome lesions, rapidly progresses to twisting and melting arms, then causes death within just a few days.”